Dreadgod (Cradle Book 11) (56)

“Is there a duplicate Book of Eternal Night there, or are the plans stored there as well?”

“All the information about the Books is kept there. We’re not allowed to bring any of it out unless we bond a Book. They’ll let me in to take a look…” She hesitated.

“You can’t access it on your own?” Lindon guessed.

“…I have to ask. There will be a record, and my mother will hear about it as soon as she cares to look. Some other member of the family will look into it immediately, and they’ll come question me.”

Lindon nodded. That was a surmountable obstacle. “What security measures are there otherwise?”

“Even if nobody sees me, there are constructs watching. And a script-circle. Plus the plans are probably in a restricted void key.” Mercy’s shoulders slumped. “That’s a lot.”

[We will be as ghosts in the night, drifting through unseen.]

“We can do this,” Lindon assured her. “We just need some more observation.”

She glanced out the window. “We’ll be done before the Titan gets here, right?”

“If we’re not, that means the Titan traveled through space to arrive directly. We’ll all have more to worry about than your advancement.”





Charity watched from across the city of Moongrave as the top of a tower was shrouded in blinding light.

That was how her owl, flying around the tower, interpreted Lindon’s barrier. If the owl crashed into that domain, it would create a clash between her authority and his, which he would certainly notice. And she couldn’t fly it close enough to the tower to eavesdrop without them noticing.

But just this much meant Lindon had put considerable effort into speaking with Mercy privately.

Charity clenched her jaw. This was the problem with people advancing too quickly, too soon. An older, wiser sacred artist would work to avoid even the appearance of antagonizing a power like the Akura clan. He was going to try something foolish and damage his own bright future.

She just hoped his mistake wasn’t so bad that it couldn’t be fixed. If he underestimated a Dreadgod and was killed, or dragged Mercy into some foolishness and enraged Malice…

Something caught the edge of her senses, and she whipped the owl’s head around. She saw a tiny red messenger construct flitting by, one of ten thousand that zipped through the city’s skies every night.

There was nothing that seemed strange about it to the eye, but it wasn’t the owl’s vision that had noticed it. It wasn’t one of the owl’s senses at all. Charity had sensed the attention of another person focusing on her, just for a moment. Another will, watching her.

But she was far away from the owl, and such senses were unreliable remotely. It was just a messenger construct anyway. Even if someone was using it to watch her, all it would see was one of her owls flying in the night sky. A common sight.

Charity cut off her connection to the owl and resolved to warn Lindon before he got himself in trouble, putting the construct out of her mind.





Back aboard Windfall, Lindon turned to Dross. “So Charity’s watching us.”

Dross giggled. [What is the use of a million eyes with wings if you don’t use them to spy?]

“That’s what Eithan would have said,” Lindon responded absently. The messenger construct Dross had hijacked to monitor his meeting with Mercy had been spotted by one of Charity’s owls.

Honestly, Lindon was impressed that Charity could sense such a brief brush of Dross’ attention. He had only glanced through the owl for a moment.

“How can we use this?” Lindon asked Dross.

As requested, Dross began to work.





Orthos had barely crawled from his egg when he first heard the stories of the black dragons.

There were holes in his memories now, eroded by time and the damage caused by the Path of Black Flame, but these were still pristine. When he would shove around his smaller siblings, his mother would stop him.

Would a black dragon do that? They were the kings of the continent; far too proud to bully the young.

When he struck down prey larger than he was and dragged it back to their cave, she would praise him. That was a hunt worthy of a dragon.

He had never been ashamed of being a turtle. Others might not recognize his value, but he knew his nobility. He was the greatest of turtles, and a descendant of dragons.

And he explained as much to Ziel as they worked together to move debris in the spacious castle his ancestors had left behind.

He hadn’t wanted to waste soulfire on transforming back to his normal size, but he couldn’t dig nearly as fast when he was only a foot from nose to tail. Now that he was larger than a human again, he could dig through the collapsed hallway at speed.

Orthos burned the debris he could, but the chunks of masonry were made to withstand black dragon’s breath, so those he grabbed in his mouth and dragged away. Ziel smashed entire collapsed walls into manageable segments or levitated them away; he was strong enough to grab them and haul them away by force, if he could get a grip on them, but some were shaped or positioned too awkwardly to move easily.

Then there was the concern that disturbing the pile too much might bring half the castle down on them.

While they worked, Orthos reminisced. When his mouth wasn’t full.